Remembering, where justice begins

Divided in childhood but children no more, Margaret Rose, Jack and Kuruk answer the echoes of childhood loves, memories and voices. Power is shifting in Darkwater Creek, old crimes cry out for justice and Nebraska’s deadliest floodwaters gather in the west.

Book Two of the River Saga, Remember How It Rained continues Seven Kinds of Rain’s voices of innocence, corruption, courage and justice on the Great Plains.

It sings of running away and coming home to find love, truth and justice in the places and people who won’t let you go.

If you haven’t yet read Seven Kinds of Rain, look for it here. At the time of this writing, Amazon and Barnes and Noble are offering crazy-good prices to set you up for the next book, if you or a friend aren’t ready. At these prices, Seven Kinds of Rain is a great Christmas gift, and with the sequel coming on so fast, the timing is right!

Driven From Home

In my upcoming novel, Seven Kinds of Rain, one of my main characters is Kuruk, a Kitkehahki Pawnee character born in Oklahoma around 1904. As a child, he runs away from different Indian schools to finally establish a tenuous existence in the heart of his ancestral homeland. Yet, in the early 1900s there were few, if any, Pawnee tribal members living in that part of Nebraska. For my writing, I set out, into libraries and on a trip through the Republican River Valley of Kansas and Nebraska to more deeply understand this change.

Looking back to Nebraska in 1900, where are the Pawnee?

For the following information, I draw heavily and cite page numbers from David Wishart’s powerful book, An Unspeakable Sadness: The Dispossession of the Nebraska Indians. I encourage you to consult it for more information on the course of Indian tribal histories in Nebraska. It was one of my most useful resources for understanding the devastations of regional history, and gave me insight to the injustices visited on Plains Indian tribes in the 1800s and 1900s.

The Pawnee’s Chaui, Skiri and Kitkehahki bands traditionally inhabited much of the region the U.S. divided into Nebraska and Kansas.

They made their homes, circular, domed riverbank earth lodges, and raised some crops, living off native plants and hunting native animals.

I learned about Kitkehahki Pawnee band plains life, as it flourished in the 1700s and early 1800s, at the Pawnee Indian Museum near Republic, Kansas, where I saw this and other Pawnee portraits by George Catlin.

George Catlin painting of Man Chief, a Kitkehahki (Republican) Pawnee

A series of government-engineered cessions of Pawnee lands during the 1800s (most of which occurred against a backdrop of tribal starvation and decimation by disease) drove the Pawnee into smaller and smaller spaces. By 1844, the meager Pawnee annuities expired, and in 1848, they lost rights to all lands south of the Platte River. (Wishart, 66) By 1858, all four Nebraska Indian societies had sold the last of their tribal lands, apart from small reservations. (69) Neglect by reservation agencies, conflicts with White settlers, and repeated intertribal conflicts further weakened the Pawnee, making Nebraska reservation life near the Loup River at best unstable, and at worst, untenable. (132)

An 1857 treaty required all Pawnee children between the ages of seven and eighteen to attend school. (179) The continuity of Pawnee culture was even more completely disrupted, as was that off all Indian tribes, by the American government’s Indian School policies of the 19th and 20th Centuries. One such Indian Industrial School was located at Genoa, Nebraska, and while some Genoa and other Indian school students reported being pleased with their American education and acculturation, for many others, their separation from family and the attempts at assimilation they suffered were devastating, sending trauma down through generations of Native families.

Genoa Indian Industrial School photo from usgennet.org

After the Kansas-Nebraska act, and by the 1870s, the Pawnee in Nebraska suffered from White settlement and theft of Pawnee land and resources, including timber, along the Loup and Platte rivers. By 1873-1875, the Pawnee were squeezed out and relocated to Oklahoma Indian Territory. (188)

Nebraska, 1900: Where are the Pawnee?

On their allotted reservation lands in Oklahoma, the Pawnee and other Plains Indian tribes came together to embrace change, wrestling with the government for decades and adapting to survive legislated deprivations and broken promises. Some of the young people became outwardly modern, educated in White ways, even as their elders preserved traditions, as in this photo.

Pawnee father and son, 1912

Long removed from their ancestral lands, the Pawnee have re-established a presence on their sacred land near the Loup River, an interesting development I’ll address in a later post. Both on and off the reservation, the Pawnee flourish and their population is on the rise. But in the early 1900s, a Pawnee character in Nebraska would seem to have been unlikely. Yet, from my authorial standpoint, one seemed necessary, to expose and explore the injustices of history.

So Kuruk Sky Seeing came to be. I hope I have done him some justice, by showing his dispossession, his fragility, and his tenacity in the place he insisted on calling home, against a world that insists he doesn’t belong off the reservation.

Seven Kinds of Rain, a new historical novel to be released July 1, 2016, is now open for entries via a Goodreads giveaway. These are Advance Reader Edition copies, and will be shipped to you with no obligation (although I’d be grateful if you’d review it, even anonymously!) There’s no charge to enter, just click on the Enter Giveaway link in the entry box below.

Book One of the River Saga, Seven Kinds of Rain revives three unwanted children’s voices, a tall-grass prairie scarred by railroad tracks, the mythic frontier’s fading heartbeat, and the violence that stole the West.

To celebrate the news of Seven Kinds of Rain’s July 1 release, I’ll be announcing a Goodreads book giveaway of Advance Reader Edition copies on Monday, here on this site.

I’m also excited to unveil the novel’s front cover design, which is rich with story imagery.

Magpie is the nickname for Margaret Rose, one of the novel’s three main characters. The brilliant magpie image, kindly contributed by photographer Keith Williams, perches on a treehouse windowsill, as a funnel cloud descends in the distance. On the back cover, a porcelain cardinal, a toy biplane, and a bear’s claw signify key events and relationships in the children’s lives.

The font selected for the cover is inspired by Edward Penfield’s early 1900’s poster art, from the same era as the story.

Seven Kinds of Rain will be available as a trade paperback, epub and mobi files, via amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com, itunes and via bookstore orders. I’m also planning direct purchase options here on this website, for those who prefer a personal touch, would like an autographed copy, or have no local bookstore.

Seven Kinds of Rain . . . July 1, 2016 . . . Save the date and watch here for more story details!

Little Servants

Children at Work in the 20th Century

The little servants were everywhere . . . until 1938, when President Roosevelt’s Fair Labor Standards Act included some of their concerns, American children were subjected to all manner of exploitation, service and labor, unprotected by any national laws. It’s sometimes said that, had the Great Depression not made adults willing to work for a child’s wage, reform may not have happened even then. Before Roosevelt’s Act, a 1916 national child labor law went into effect to block interstate transport of goods if underage laborers were involved in production, but it was struck down in 1918. In 1924, Congress attempted to pass a constitutional amendment to protect children, but it was blocked and eventually dropped. Children were fair game in America in the early 1900s, both in their families and in society.

“Frequently beginning their working lives before their tenth birthday, children worked in hazardous jobs at mines, mills, factories, sweatshops, and on farms, with little or no wages. Labor laws did not exist, and the common perception of the ease with which children were manipulated made them targets for a variety of rights violations.”1

While laws protect most children today, their labor remains unregulated in American agriculture. The 1938 federal laws still allow children as young as 12 years old to work unlimited hours before and after school in the ag sector. As a result, as many as 500,000 children pick almost a quarter of America’s harvested food, and they’re sorely underpaid. Some may assume this is an immigration issue, or describes children who work on prosperous family farms, but most of these working children are American citizens who suffer from poverty so intense, they can’t afford to buy the food they harvest.2

My grandmother, Laura, was born in 1906, into a world where children were often seen by many as little servants, small adults expected to work to survive, often in fields or factories. Readers may have seen Laura’s handwriting and read her ledger notes in my first novel, The Darkwater Liar’s Account. Before she was the young housewife recording how to make her own soap from lard and lye, she was the abandoned child left at a Lutheran orphanage in Fremont, Nebraska.

For some orphans in 1911, adoption offered a chance to be part of a family, but this didn’t happen for my grandmother. When she was five years old, she and her sister were placed with different families, and Laura’s didn’t choose to adopt her. They wanted a worker, so in the official census in 1920, she’s recorded as a “boarder” at that family’s address. In truth, she was a hard-worked child servant in a household that looked down on her, even as they provided the bare essentials. A typical Christmas gift was a few yards of cloth for that year’s dress. Her responsibilities included taking care of children not much younger than herself, and she was whipped for their misbehavior. There were no laws to protect children during her childhood, and no loving parents, in her case.

My grandmother’s story, like many stories of the little servants who worked in America, remains a mystery. We’ve never located either of her parents, and we don’t know why her father left her behind, promising to return, and yet, never did so. Family mysteries inspire stories, and my grandmother is the inspiration for Margaret Rose and the little servants, the unwanted children in my new novel, Seven Kinds of Rain, to be released this summer. My grandmother was quieter than Margaret, but surely had as much grit, to survive as she did.

I think readers will like Margaret Rose, who earns the nickname Magpie in the story. She’s smart and takes on all comers. Here’s a little of Maggie’s voice, as she considers the woman she works for, in Seven Kinds of Rain:

“In one carton of books up here, I found Fowles’ New Easy Latin Primer. It teaches a funny language nobody speaks, but it’s a mother to other languages. It has no letter W. Latin is confusing, so I asked my teacher about declensions. She said it’s not a usual question for an eight-year-old girl, but she explained well.

“Trying to forget about Florence, I sit on my mattress to look at the Latin book. My teacher says I’m lucky to have a special talent to remember everything I read and with Latin, I have my own secret language. Maybe for a diary, or if I have a friend someday, we can use it for secrets. To help me feel better, I also found some little swears nobody will understand, but nothing bad enough to send me to hell. Like puter anus, which means rotten old woman but sounds worse. And verres and clunis, hog and buttock.

“Remembering Florence’s red, crying face distracts me from the Latin on the pages. I’m sorry for her and want to forgive the whippings and missed school. The Latin swears help a little, like letting steam out of my hot kettle, but I can only say them in the closet or up here. It doesn’t help that Florence’s little pointy teeth and long nose remind me of a fox, vulpes. If she looked softer, more like a rabbit, lepus, I’d feel more like petting her, and less like trapping her and pelting her out.”

Watch for more information about the world of Seven Kinds of Rain in upcoming posts, with Maggie and her friends, Jack and Kuruk. Then the book comes, in summer, 2016, for you to find yourself in the story.

Be sure to subscribe for updates, and follow K. Lyn Wurth on Facebook, to stay up-to-date. And thanks for reading. I appreciate every one of you!

October was a great month for travel, and the Pacific Northwest put on a beautiful show for Women Writing the West in Redmond. This month also brings a sense of direction for my latest novel, SEVEN KINDS OF RAIN.

In Oregon we walked and drove through breathtaking landscapes, visited the Imperial Livestock Ranch where we met an amazing Western woman entrepreneur, learned about the latest trends in publishing and honed our craft. Not to mention having a great time catching up with old and new friends! Endless inspiration . . . I came home energized to write more. I also met some very nice sheep.

I appreciate receiving an honorable mention for my short story, “Fool’s Moon,” which you can read along with other LAURA Short Fiction Award winners here. I read an excerpt at the awards dinner and people laughed in all the right places. A writer always hopes for that!

Since returning from Oregon, I’ve been editing my novel-in-process, which I’ve titled SEVEN KINDS OF RAIN. Yes, this the working title announcement and you saw it here, first. I’ll publish a sneak-preview synopsis soon.

While I had expected to self-publish this novel and its sequel, my professional editor surprised me with her favorable response to the manuscript. When she said loved it so much, she’d be reading it in “all six of her book clubs,” I began to rethink my publishing and marketing strategy. I’ve already designed a book cover and a book trailer. It felt good to move in that familiar direction, but . . .

I’m not one to think less of a self-published novel, or more of one that’s traditionally published. Literary excellence can rise or fail and there can be pitfalls, either way. But after self-publishing THE DARKWATER LIAR’S ACCOUNT, I understand more of the difficult aspects of doing everything myself. The most difficult parts are gaining reader and professional reviews, garnering publicity and otherwise expanding my reach to more readers.

Of course, an author gives up control when she joins with a professional team to produce a book. It’s business. It’s about sales number and the bottom line. I will face difficulties, simply different ones, if a publishing house sees potential in my novel. I’ll still be engaged in the marketing, as every author must be in today’s competitive marketplace.

So, SEVEN KINDS OF RAIN now begins the query circuit, seeking literary agent representation. I’ve done this before, so I’m pumping up for the emotional and mental exertion—many successful novels have endured more than seventy rejections before an agent fell in love. Each one of those attempts signifies selecting and researching an appropriate agent, crafting a personal pitch letter, tailoring a novel synopsis and then waiting, sometimes from 6-8 weeks, for a reply. My first novel, THE DARKWATER LIAR’S ACCOUNT, went through thirty attempts before I decided to self-publish. It takes a thick skin to find an agent, then to endure numerous rejections by publishing houses. So, we’ll see how it goes . . . because unexpected, amazing things can happen.

And one can always use one more item to cross off the Bucket List.

Exceed seventy literary agent rejections for one novel manuscript.

Better yet, let’s be optimistic. Send your good wishes to SEVEN KINDS OF RAIN, my latest and best story yet. I hope to share it with my faithful and new readers, soon!